Cracking The Human Code

Matt Quirk chats with Matt Yglesias about his recent novel, The Directive, which involves breaking into the Fed. The premise:

[T]he idea is that, rather than a heist relying on brute force like blowing up the safe, or stealth like doing gymnastics through a laser field, you get in by abusing people’s trust. When I planned out the book, I actually talked to the red teams that work for government facilities to try to break into them, and most of their techniques are based on social engineering and getting people to trust them and let them in.

It could be something as simple as having two cups of coffee — like when I went into the elevator at Vox’s office, somebody saw I was busy and they just swiped me in because I look like I belong here. Another famous one is the smokers’ door. If you get to the smokers’ door before the smokers come out and you seem like you belong there, they’ll let you back in the building because people are very reluctant to challenge people.

To beat social engineering, you would have to challenge everyone, which just isn’t in our makeup. It works at the Pentagon, they have guys with podiums everywhere whose job is to challenge people. But otherwise if you turned around and slammed the door in someone’s face and said, “swipe in,” you would seem so rude, and that’s just so against human nature. That’s the trait that these guys use to break into places.